Got a bunch of test maps made yesterday. The documentation is lacking here a lot so someone should write some. Personally I plan to type down some of my experiences after "putting some behind" first .

There are some things that are still unclear to me, and it seems to other people too. I've gone through the forums some, but there's the problem that the information is on a forum, which traditionally means stuff can be outdated etc. It would be good to have this stuff in one place where it would be kept up to date and could be referred to.

1) The maps are scaled to 1280x720? Why is this and where does that number come from, can it possibly be changed? I myself rock a 4k display here, not a tablet and that resolution is not the optimal one.

2) What's up with the white borders!? There's this beautiful flowing background, then I make yet another beautiful psychedelic map on top of that. One might not call the actual graphics of the game beautiful, but they are to me! So now we got three beautiful layers on top of it all and WHITE BORDERS to ruin it all! *waves fist in the air like a grumpy old man*

As you can see, I myself don't think we only need to reproduce actual earth maps etc. and as soon as I get more information on the mechanics for this works, I think I'm going to start experimenting more with the form of the maps.

Hi! First of all, very interesting maps, I definitely did not imagine those kinds of maps Stupid forum to limit attachments, I'll see if I can change that when I get home. Meanwhile, can you email the map files to me, my username @ gmail.com ?

As for the questions:

1. It is 720p because it was always 720p I guess I figured it's a reasonable size to get decent visual details, but not each too much memory, as the maps I ship need to run on mobile devices. You are the first person to request that this be changed, but I believe I can make it happen

2. I can definitely make this configurable as well. The mod system is fairly flexible on a source code level ... Oh, and thanks for calling the game graphics beautiful, not every reviewer in Google Play agrees with you

Just sent the files. One thing that isn't clear to me is the measures of the map itself, I mean: the background is size x*y (1280*720), does that mean the horizontal distance between two stars can be 1280 (something) at most or is that just the size of the background? This is one thing that could be different on more powerful machines, the worlds could be much larger, right? Have you ever run stress tests, like to check the limits of the engine when ran on machine that isn't a tablet?

Interesting topic, the size of galaxies 1280x720 is just the size of the background.

The size of space itself (let's say in terms of star radii, which is constant) will scale depending on the amount of stars AND the generator you use.

So square galaxy generator is obviously more dense than say a ring shape generator. So what goes wrong in the case where the game isn't able to place the stars in your galaxy is simply that it misjudged how "dense" the map was - which it estimates by seeing how many pixels are available. So I either would need to make that smarter, or force the map to specify a value or (most hacky) give up after a while and try again with a bigger area. Maybe a combination of 2 and 3, where the map maker should adjust initial value maybe based on what the game tells it after a couple of failures.

I didn't try to see how far I can pump it up. But given that I can run 32x timelapse with 1000 stars with no framedrop, maybe something like 32,000 stars is possible (in 1x speed). And with a proper modern gaming rig, maybe much more. Do you have a monster rig?